23 May 2013

Our Blog is Moving!

Hello Thyme With a Green Thumb Followers!

We wanted to let you know we are always trying to update and improve, and so have decided to move our blog hosting to Wordpress.  The new blog's address is: www.vanputte.wordpress.com and we would so appreciate you heading over and following us there!  All you need to do is click that link, input your email address into the "Follow Us" box, and click "Follow" and then you'll get all the new Van Putte updates.  All of our past blogs, archives and comments have been transferred so you won't miss a thing -- instead you'll get a more streamlined reading experience, and we'll have the opportunity for even more photos, links and informative posts!

We appreciate your support over the past few years on the blog and hope to see you over at www.vanputte.wordpress.com soon, liking and commenting on our new blog!

Best,
Green Thumb Staff

09 May 2013

By the Numbers: Civic Center Garage Green Roof

The roof of the Civic Center Parking Garage after Van Putte got done with it!
Another view of the green roof of the
Civic Center Parking Garage with some of
the new stone, sod and trees we installed.
We're very happy to say that after three summers of work, the Civic Center Parking Garage has a new park on its roof, completed by our landscape division!  And, we won an award to boot!  The NYS Nursery and Landscape Association awarded Van Putte Landscape the NYS Environmental Beautification Award for excellence in landscape design and construction this month.  Green roofs are a really neat method of re-purposing old, broken or under-utilized space in cities, while saving money and energy over the long term.  The roof is now a 3.5-acre public park, so the next time you're downtown, check it out!



Some of the 10,000 original granite
pavers on the roof of the Civic Center
that Van Putte removed.
Now, for the project "by-the-numbers" :)

  • Installed 75,000 square feet of sod, sedum, trees and shrubs = 8.25 Olympic-sized swimming pools
  • Installed 2,500 cubic yards of lightweight growth material = over 31 full semi trucks or 250 Van Putte dump trucks
  • Installed 160,000 square feet of drainage board = about 3 football fields
  • Installed 6,500 tons of new stone = weight of 5,200 Honda Civics
  • And.... removed 10,000 4-ft by 4-ft granite pavers, which if you laid them end-to-end, would be the same distance as climbing up and down Mt. Marcy (highest point in NYS) 4 times!
Wow! (...and whew! :) )